Future Salon

Will We drive more once we have Robocars?

As I wrote before I can't wait to have my car drive me where I want to go. What a relief that will be. --- Thinking about it, it may be too much relief. Once the drudgery of long distance driving is taken out of the equation, I am happy to drive even further.

Birthday party by my buddy in Seattle this Saturday? No problem. Friday night hop in my robocar and arrive Saturday morning relative well rested, can even help him with the preperations, party all night, hang out on Sunday and drive back through the night again. Perfect.

Similar with commuting. Everyone having a car enabled the urban sprawl, created Suburbia. Robocars will make it possible to live even further away from your place of work.

We better step on the gas pedal regarding renewable energy.

It is going to be an interesting discussion at the Transportation Future Salon on Friday the 16th of January 2009.
Picture taken by storem.

Doug Engelbart's Mother of all Demos was 40 years ago

StudioSF has posted a long list of events commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Mother of all Demos (video).

I remember falling off my chair year's ago when I realized what Doug Engelbert had done at the end of the 60s. Let's not forget regarding computers this was punch card time. What he demoed in short: Monitor interface (almost graphical), mouse (the thing that most people associate him with), file concept, remote collaboration, video conference, done wireless between SRI and Fort Mason using trucks parked on Skyline Boulevard I was told.

You may ask yourself, how was it possible that one man heading a team of engineers was able to make a quantum leap of development. (If ever there was a quantum leap, this was it)

Check out the Collective IQ Future Salon video for his story.

Early on in his life he came to the following powerful goals: Let me design a professional goal which will maximize the contribution my career can have to mankind!

Weeks later his lifetime goal emerged: As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.

One other great Doug quote: The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.

Still he is very humble. When he was asked by a journalist if he doesn't feel great that his inventions are used by so many people all over the world, he replied: "Not if I think about where we could be."

At his 80th birthday he told his guests, that he feels like a failure because he was not able to finish his original vision of creating a Collective IQ for humankind.

Therefore check out the festivities and go to as many as you can.

I especially like December 9th's morning program as it is a call to action to organize ourselves to move forward to harness the collective intelligence of our community. As I think the pieces are in place, let's work on putting them together and improving them.  (Unfortunately it looks like I will be on vacation that day :-( )

Bottom Up Security at the Future Salon (stream info)

Open Source Sensing Future Salon with Christine Peterson in a couple of hours. Let's find a better way than "Bomb bomb Iran" to secure ourselves and others. Top down security somehow seems to make us less safe by the minute, let's talk about alternatives via open source sensing from the bottom up.

Come join us tonight in person at SAP Labs in Palo Alto or via Ustream.tv: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/future-salon. See you all there.

Free TV Show from Ustream

Future Salon Show on Ustream.tv

Looks like we found a more reliable home for the streaming of our Future Salons: Ustream.tv. After years of taping and some ending up on the Internet Archive, we have started to share our tapes on Google Video too. Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Nothing beats to be life at the Future Salon in Palo Alto. Second best is via the Internet with chat session, that is was Ustream.tv with http://www.ustream.tv/channel/future-salon is providing us. Join us this Thursday the 21st of August for Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto.   

Open Source Learning Future Salon this Thursday 21nd

I am so psyched about this Thursday's Open Source Learning Future Salon. If you check out the following video interviews with our speaker John Taylor Gatto, you may be too. That we are able to access this kind of information with a simple search and a broadband connection just blows my mind. Just another search away and you can enjoy Olga Korbut's Uneven Bar exercise from 1972, but I digress ;-).

All of John's 19 lectures are located at edflix (Educational Video Downloads) site. They are part of World Prosperity Ltd. who's mission is to determine how to make social systems such as education, healthcare, government, and families work more effectively. They do this by examining basic, underlying causes and their solutions. Current project is to teach others how to make educational movies easily and cheaply. They are coordinating the free distribution of these movies and be a central resource for locating them. This will support K-12, university, and postgraduate education. I am wondering whether that should all go into the Wikiversity.

John Taylor Gatto just finished his latest book: Weapons of Mass Instruction, which is unfortunately not yet available. He will talk about Open Source Learning. Looking like edflix is one of the sources to it.

Most focus of raising a child today is put on education and schooling in particular. The big shift in schooling lately has been towards standardized testing and teaching towards these tests.

John makes a convincing case, that this is exactly the wrong direction. He thinks, and has a lifetime of teaching as proof , that institutionalized schooling is the wrong approach, is actually dumbing us down. With this opinion he is rattling one of the foundation of our society. It is going to be very interesting this Thursday.

 Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto Thursday August 21st at SAP in Palo Alto. Future Salons have the following structure: 6-7pm is networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP; 7-9+pm is the presentation followed by questions and discussion.

John Taylor Gatto: School is a liar’s world. Let us be done with it.

Got an email yesterday with the following question regarding our Open Source Learning Future Salon:

Mark, thanks for putting on a great lecture series. I got a lot out of Jamais Cascio's seminar. The description of Gatto's presentation sounds like a diatribe against our current education system, which we all agree could be improved. Does he has any positive suggestions? The talk as described sounds like a bummer.

I asked John about any positive suggestions to our education problem and here is his responds: An article he wrote a couple of years ago. Once you read it, you may understand why I am so looking forward to our Open Source Learning Future Salon on the 21st of August. RSVP: http://snurl.com/32ggk

Compulsion-schooling tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.

Admit there is no one right to grow up successfully.
One-system schooling has-had a century and a half to prove itself. It is a ghastly failure, Children need the widest possible range of roads in order to find the right one to accommodate themselves. The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody. 1fax credits, vouchers, and other more sophisticated means the necessary to encourage a diverse mix of different school logics of growing up. Only sharp competition can reform the present mess; this needs to be an overriding goal of public policy. Neither national nor state government oversight is necessary to make a voucher/tax credit plan work:
a modicum of local control, a disclosure law with teeth, and a policy of client satisfaction or else is all the citizen protection heeded. It works for supermarkets and doctors. It will work for schools, too, without national testing.

Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto

Thursday 21st of August '08 6pm: Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto at SAP in Palo Alto Please RSVP: http://snurl.com/32ggk

John Taylor Gatto's ended his teaching career after 30 years, while being New York City Teacher of the Year for the third time and New York State Teacher of the year for the second time with on op-ed in the Wall Street Journal writing, that he was no longer willing to hurt children.

Since then he has written several books. Examples:    

• Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum Of Compulsory Schooling
• The Underground History of American Education    

When I talked to him on the phone, he was just putting the finishing touches on his latest book out on the first of October: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling    

Doc Searls as well as Jerry Michalski pointed him out to me years ago. Here is what Jerry wrote in 2003 about John's Harper's Bazar article:

Gatto's in Harper's

Doc first turned me on to John Taylor Gatto's ideas years ago by steering me
toward an essay Gatto had published in The Sun. I think it was his
Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (upgraded to seven, then eight: forgetfulness,
bewilderment and confusion, assigned classism, indifference, emotional
dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem and the "glass
house effect," a total lack of privacy). I've been a fan ever since, and a
questioner not only of compulsory education, which Gatto convincingly
eviscerates, but also of our society's other compulsions.

When I told Jerry that our next Future Salon would be with John Taylor Gatto, he said: You know that he is my hero, when is it? I'll be there. Doc's reaction was: This is great. Let me know when, if I am in Santa Barbara, I will come up for it.

You too should 'come up for it' if you are around: Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto Thursday August 21st at SAP in Palo Alto. 

Crowd and Open Sourced Mobile Devices Future Salon

Update: Added the bios of the two speakers to the post.

O.K. everyone let's all stop the drooling over the iPhone. There are in my opinion more interesting developments happening in the mobile handheld space.

Two of them we will look at on Monday the 23rd of June at our usual hang out SAP Labs.

First there is Ismael Ghalimi who gave away at his Office 2.0 conference one year an iPod Nano, last year an iPhone and had the crazy idea, that the participants of the conference could develop with him the device for this year's Office 2.0. He calls it the Redux Model 1. In his own words:

The more interesting option would be to build our own device. By that I mean designing, certifying, and manufacturing our very own piece of hardware, all in the one year that separates us for the next Office 2.0 Conference. Today’s engineering processes make such a challenge technically feasible, but for someone who has never done it before, and has no engineering budget for it, this is virtually impossible, so by all means, please assume that we will fail and have to revert to option 1. But if you dare to dream with us for a moment, feel free to read what follows.[more]

Last time I talked with him he was looking for a CEO for the venture, but not certain whether it will be available for Office 2.0. Still the approach of getting input from his network and publically develop a new device is such a novel approach, that I invited him to speak about his experiences.

Another interesting development I found at Buglabs.
Doc Searls is convinced, that the IT industry is going to develop similar to the construction industry. Check out this article: 

This change in perception is tied to the relative (im)maturity of the computer indus-
try; when it finishes growing up, it will look much like the construction industry.

Now the folks at Buglabs have created a mobile base station that they call the bug and they have many modules that you can connect to it like Lego blocks.  The cool thing is, that software as well as hardware is Open Source, that means there is only a limit in imagination and funds to possible extensions of the bug.

Jeremy Toeman from Buglabs will present their approach and current status. He also promised to bring some bugs and extensions.  It is going to be very interesting.

Cure Aging Event in LA

Aging 2008 is the opening session for the technically focused Understanding Aging conference, running June 28-29 at UCLA.

Their press release opens up with: "Have you ever dreamed climbing Mount Everest on your 125th birthday?"

From the far this sounds cool, but I just think, why would you want to? What a waist of passion to direct it towards climbing the highest rock on earth. I once heard that the natives didn't even have a name for Mount Everest, because compared to all the other mountains around him, he was just unspectacular, not worth a name.

If you really ant to live forever, you wouldn't put yourself in such a risky situation. I recommend reading Into thin Air by Jon Krakauer. It describes in vivid details the risks involved. Wanting to live forever has its limiting factors.

Honestly the woman on the event picture just looks a bit creepy and I start to wonder whether the most pressing question on this earth isn't aging, but why almost everyone is following the cult of wanting to be young, wanting to look younger ... More on that in a later post.

Truth is, I really like Aubrey de Grey. The Future Salon debate between him and William Hurlbut was one of our best Salons ever.

We were afterwards standing outside and he said, that it is O.K. with him, if he dies before the problem of aging is solved. He, and I am transcribing now from memory, will be happy that he has done what he could to solve the problem and to push solutions forward.

Therefore I am a bit bummed, that I am not in LA at that time to  join him and top scientists and advocates at this event. I would have loved to get an update.

Picture from the Future Current

 

What we can learn from Maasai Warriors

This was one of the most interesting Future Salons we ever had with Sabore Oiye and Salaton Ole’ Ntutu.

I have never met warriors that were that soft spoken, grounded and happy.

They told us briefly about their upbringing and there were already some lessons in there: When they are very young like 6-7 years old, they are already put in charge of some sheep or goats. Here in the west, you would claim child labor, but within the Maasai culture it is part of how you learn to be a responsible member of the tribe. Once you get older you are put in charge of larger animals.